The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)

by Kathi Weeks

With so much at stake, weighed down with so many expectations, it is no wonder that the ethical discourse of work is becoming ever more abstracted from the realities of many jobs. Within the two-tiered labor market, we find new modes of "over-valorized work" at one end of the labor hierarchy and "devalorized work" at the other (Peterson 2003, 76). Making labor flexible results in an increase of part-time, temporary, casual, and precarious forms of work. At one end, as Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio note, "the quality and the quantity of paid labor no longer justify-if they ever did-the underlying claim derived from religious sources that has become the basis of contemporary social theory and social policy: the view that paid work should be the core of personal identity" (1994, 302). At the other end of the labor hierarchy, work is expected to be the whole of life, colonizing and eclipsing what remains of the social. At the same time, the work ethic is more insistently-and perhaps desperately-defended. "Never," Andre Gorz observes, "has the `irreplaceable,' `indispensable' function of labour as the source of `social ties,' `social cohesion, `integration,' `socialization, `personalization,' 'personal identity and meaning been invoked so obsessively as it has since the day it became unable any longer to fulfill any of these functions" (1999) 57).